When Will Google Fiber Be Available in Your City?

Upcoming Google Fiber cities

Many of the areas where Google Fiber is expanding are near existing Google Fiber cities. For example, Google Fiber has been slowly expanding in Salt Lake City, Utah, for several years. Now it’s extending its network into many of the neighboring cities in the Salt Lake Valley.

Although the list of currently announced new cities is still relatively short, Google Fiber is also expanding its network within current Google Fiber cities. For example, in early 2021, Google Fiber expanded into four more neighborhoods in Austin, Texas: Allandale, North Loop, Mueller, and North Shoal Creek. As it expands its network in Austin, Google Fiber plans to add more neighborhoods in the near future.⁶

Google has also expanded into several new neighborhoods in the Raleigh-Durham area, with new coverage areas in the cities of Chapel Hill and Carrboro.⁷ If you live in or near an existing Google Fiber city, your odds are better than most for getting Google Fiber in your neighborhood.

Current Google Fiber cities

Google Fiber began with a single city in 2010 and quickly expanded to a handful of cities across the country. At the time of its announcement, 1 Gbps (1,000 Mbps) was about 100 times faster than the average residential internet speed.⁸ And it wasn’t targeted at huge tech hubs like Silicon Valley and Seattle, but at suburban cities like Kansas City, Missouri, and Provo, Utah.

The massive hype surrounding these early Google Fiber cities not only pushed other cities to compete for Google’s attention but also made customers start demanding more from their internet service providers (ISPs). Over the next few years, fiber-optic connections went from being almost unheard-of in residential internet to being the gold standard of internet connections against which all other connection types are judged.

Google hits pause

Despite the popularity of Google Fiber and the overwhelming number of cities lining up to become the next fiber city (Google expected between 10 and 50 applications and ended up with over 1,000), the project was put on hold a few years later.⁸

In Louisville, Kentucky, AT&T filed lawsuits against the local city and county governments to prevent Google Fiber from using utility poles, thus slowing down the network’s deployment. These lawsuits halted Google Fiber’s expansion and kept eager potential customers waiting for years for fiber to get to their neighborhood. Although a judge later dismissed the lawsuits as frivolous, the project was severely derailed.⁹

During this time, Google Fiber experimented with ”microtrenching,” an installation method where, instead of digging a deep, foot-wide trench, a crew could simply carve a narrow groove into a road, only slightly wider than the cable and a few inches deep.

Unfortunately, the experiment in Louisville went poorly, and many fiber-optic cables became damaged or even popped out of the road, tripping pedestrians.¹⁰ Google had to pay to repair the roads damaged during the failed installation and eventually pulled out of Louisville altogether.

At this point, the company had announced that Google Fiber was pausing all fiber-optic projects. Not only were potential expansions into new cities canceled, but mentions of network expansion in existing Google Fiber cities also disappeared from the provider’s website.¹¹ For a time, this looked like the end of Google Fiber.

Google Fiber today

After a long silence, Google Fiber announced its first new city in four years: West Des Moines, Iowa.¹² Shortly after that, it announced several new cities around Salt Lake City, Utah.^{2, 3, 4, 5} Although this expansion is not quite as aggressive as its initial campaign, it seems likely that Google Fiber will continue to expand into new areas.

Despite the numerous setbacks that it encountered in places like Louisville, Google Fiber is continuing to explore new and innovative ways of delivering fiber-to-the-home technology. For example, despite its previous failure with microtrenching, Google Fiber is once again using this technique in places like Taylorsville, Utah.³

Google Fiber is also engaging in more public-private partnerships in order to expand its fiber network. It previously made similar deals with cities like Provo, Utah, which sold its municipal fiber infrastructure to Google.¹³ In West Des Moines, the city is building an “open conduit” that can be leased out to providers like Google Fiber.¹⁴ Many other countries handle internet infrastructure like this, and it can help increase competition among ISPs while reducing costs to customers.

How to get Google Fiber in your area

Google Fiber is still a relatively small ISP compared to companies like AT&T and Xfinity, so if it’s not in your city yet, you probably have a long wait ahead of you. In the meantime, there are some things that you can do to encourage Google Fiber and other fiber providers to expand into your area.

The most direct thing you can do is encourage change on a local level. Go to town council meetings. Talk to your state representatives. When state and local governments invest in municipal internet infrastructure and open networks, it can lower the barrier for smaller ISPs like Google Fiber to enter the area, improving speeds and increasing competition. Similar initiatives have been announced in places like New York City in order to bring universal broadband to all its residents.¹⁵

If nothing else, demand more from your internet. When Google Fiber was first announced, no one thought residential customers would want gigabit internet speeds. Now, demand for video chat, streaming services, and other media have made slower connections almost obsolete. If there’s enough demand for high-speed internet, some company will try to get it to you.

Google Fiber Webpass

Google Fiber Webpass (formerly known as Google Webpass) is a service that provides fixed wireless internet for high-occupancy buildings, such as apartments and office buildings. Unlike most providers, Google Fiber Webpass doesn’t offer service to individual households, but rather to landlords, who then wire the whole building and give tenants the option to use the built-in internet service.

Somewhat confusingly, Google Fiber Webpass is not a fiber connection, and it is not available in Google Fiber Cities. The name is simply for branding purposes—the two services are completely distinct.

Most widely available fiber providers

If Google Fiber isn’t available in your area yet, there might be another provider in your area offering fiber internet plans. Many nationwide ISPs are rolling out fiber-to-the-home connections to meet customer demands, and many of them have a much bigger fiber network than Google Fiber. The big difference is that none of these providers have a 100% fiber network like Google Fiber, so just because a provider covers your area, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they offer fiber at your address.